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Google CEO says more than a quarter of the company's new code is created by AI

businessinsider.com

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Re: Google CEO says more than a quarter of the company's new code is created by AI

#811

Post by lenerdenator »

ahmedfromtunis wrote: post #705
NotAnOtter wrote: post #653

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also work at google (until last Friday). Agree with what you said. My thoughts are 1. This quote is clearly meant to exaggerate reality, and they are likely including things like fully automated CL/PR's which have been around for a decade as "AI generated". 2. I stated before that if a team of 10 is equally as productive as a team of 8 utilizing things like copilot, it's fair to say "AI replaced 2 engineers", in my…

> no one is stating "we've replaced X% of our workforce with AI" Even if that's been happening, I don't think it would be politically savvy to admit it. In today's social climate claiming to replace humans with AI would attract the wrong kind of attention from politicians (during an election year) and from the public in general. This would be even more unwise to admit for a company like Google who's an "AI producer".…

> I don't think it would be politically savvy to admit it.

Would it be? Do they care?

Sam Altman's been talking about how GenAI could break capitalism (maybe not the exact quote, but something similar), and these companies have been pushing out GenAI products that could obviously and easily be used to fake photographic or video evidence of things that have occurred in the real world. Elon's obsessed with making an AI that's trained to be a 20-year-old male edgelord from the sewer pits of the internet.

Compared to those things, "we've replaced X% of our workforce with AI" is absolutely anodyne.

Re: Google CEO says more than a quarter of the company's new code is created by AI

#812

Post by lenerdenator »

tjahg wrote: post #800
rty32 wrote: post #787

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't think it would be politically savvy to admit it. Depends on who you ask. If Trump wins and Elon Musk actually gets a new job, they would be bragging about replacing humans with AI all day long. And corporates are going to love it. Not sure about what voters think though. But the fact that most of these companies are in California, New York etc means that it barely matters.

[flagged]

That would be the way someone with no real awareness of the philosophies and realities of the two parties in the US would see it. And to be fair, that's a good description of a large chunk of the American electorate.

But you can't have a guy who literally used to relieve himself into a golden toilet take over your party and be anything but the party of big business and billionaires.

Re: Google CEO says more than a quarter of the company's new code is created by AI

#813

Post by jb1991 »

asdfman123 wrote: post #398

I work for Google, and I just got done with my work day. I was just writing I guess what you'd call "AI generated code." But the code completion engine is basically just good at finishing the lines I'm writing. If I'm writing "function getAc..." it's smart enough to complete to "function getActionHandler()", and maybe suggest the correct arguments and a decent jsdoc comment. So basically, it's a helpful productivity…

Long before this current AI hype cycle, we’ve had excellent code completion in editors for decades. So I guess by that definition, we’ve all been writing AI assisted code for a very long time.

Re: Google CEO says more than a quarter of the company's new code is created by AI

#814

Post by fhd2 »

jb1991 wrote: post #813
asdfman123 wrote: post #398

I work for Google, and I just got done with my work day. I was just writing I guess what you'd call "AI generated code." But the code completion engine is basically just good at finishing the lines I'm writing. If I'm writing "function getAc..." it's smart enough to complete to "function getActionHandler()", and maybe suggest the correct arguments and a decent jsdoc comment. So basically, it's a helpful productivity…

Long before this current AI hype cycle, we’ve had excellent code completion in editors for decades. So I guess by that definition, we’ve all been writing AI assisted code for a very long time.

I'd say so, and it's a bit misleading to leave that out. Code generation is almost as old as computing. So far, most of it happened to be deterministic.

Re: Google CEO says more than a quarter of the company's new code is created by AI

#815

Post by munk-a »

danielmarkbruce wrote: post #430
reverius42 wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To err is human. To err at scale is AI.

To err at scale isn't unique to AI. We don't say "no software, it can err at scale".

CEOs embracing the marginal gains of LLMs by dumping billions into it are certainly great examples of humans erring at scale.

Re: Google CEO says more than a quarter of the company's new code is created by AI

#816

Post by dep_b »

randomdata wrote: post #809
dep_b wrote: post #806

A quarter of all new code? Of course. Especially if you include all "smart autocomplete" code. When dealing with a fermenting pile of technical debt? I expect very little. LLM's don't have application-wide context yet. AI is definitely revolutionizing our field, but the same people that said that no-code tools and all of the other hype-of-the-decade technologies would make developers jobless are actually the people A…

At the end of the day an LLM is just a compiler anyway. The developer isn't going away even if 100% of the code is generated by LLMs, just as the developer didn't go away when we stopped spending our days flipping toggle switches.

I'm actually surprised that _the others_ always think that the programmers somehow will make themselves obsolete first? If it gets cheaper to make software, more software will be made, until we reach the point again we're running short on people capable enough to keep it all running.

Re: Google CEO says more than a quarter of the company's new code is created by AI

#817

Post by ActionHank »

ntulpule wrote: post #88

Hi, I lead the teams responsible for our internal developer tools, including AI features. We work very closely with Google DeepMind to adapt Gemini models for Google-scale coding and other Software Engineering usecases. Google has a unique, massive monorepo which poses a lot of fun challenges when it comes to deploying AI capabilities at scale. 1. We take a lot of care to make sure the AI recommendations are safe and…

Would you say that the efficiency gain is less than, equal to, or greater than the cost?

It's always felt like having AI in the cloud for better autocomplete is a lot for a small gain.

Re: Google CEO says more than a quarter of the company's new code is created by AI

#818

Post by JohnFen »

randomdata wrote: post #778
Aachen wrote: post #701

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why remove the comment that summarises the intent for humans? The compiler will ignore your comment anyway, so it's only there for the next human who comes along and will help them understand the code

Like he says, the "comment" describes what he wants to do . That's not what humans are interested in. The human already knows "what he wants to do" when they read the code. It's the things like "why did he want to do this in the first place?" that is lacking in the code, and what information is available to add in a comment for the sake of humans. Remember, LLMs are just compilers for programming languages that just…

> Like he says, the "comment" describes what he wants to do. That's not what humans are interested in.

When I'm maintaining other people's code, or my own after enough time has gone by, I'm very interested in that sort of comment. It gives me a chance to see if the code as written does what the comment says it was intended to do. It's not valuable for most of the code in a project, but is incredibly valuable for certain key parts.

You're right that comments about why things were done the way they were are the most valuable ones, but this kind of comment is in second place in my book.

Re: Google CEO says more than a quarter of the company's new code is created by AI

#819

Post by busterarm »

atoav wrote: post #537
asdfman123 wrote: post #398

I work for Google, and I just got done with my work day. I was just writing I guess what you'd call "AI generated code." But the code completion engine is basically just good at finishing the lines I'm writing. If I'm writing "function getAc..." it's smart enough to complete to "function getActionHandler()", and maybe suggest the correct arguments and a decent jsdoc comment. So basically, it's a helpful productivity…

So this is basically the google CEO saying "a quarter of our terminal inputs is written by a glorified tab completion"?

glorified, EXPENSIVE tab completion.

Re: Google CEO says more than a quarter of the company's new code is created by AI

#820

Post by Aachen »

_heimdall wrote: post #767
Aachen wrote: post #726

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tried making a meme some months ago with exactly this idea, but for emails. One person would tell an LLM "answer that I'm fine with either option" and sends a 5 KB email, in response to which the recipient receives it and gets the automatic summary function to tell them (in a good case) "they're happy either way" or (in a bad case) "they don't give a damn". It didn't really work, too complex for meme format as far…

If someone is going to use an LLM to send me an email, I'd much rather them just send me the prompt directly. For the LLM message to be useful the prompt would have included all the context and details anyway, I don't need an LLM to make it longer and sound more "professional" or polite.

That is actually exactly my unstated point / the awareness I was hoping to achieve by trying to make that meme :D
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